Rush Gets Through the Lifestyle Stack

Feb 21, 2007

RUSH: All right, let’s get to the lifestyle section. Eagerly awaited since yesterday. First up from New York, this is Associated Press and CBS dispatch combined. ?In what it says is an attempt to get students to debate the issue of illegal immigration, a student Republican club at New York University has dreamed up a novel game that has some on campus calling the event ?racist.? In the game planned for Thursday, called ?Find the Illegal Immigrant,? members of the club who present their NYU identification become immigration agents looking for an illegal in the crowd. The agent who successfully identifies the illegal immigrant wins a gift certificate. Students have sent club officials e-mails calling the event ?racist? and ?disgusting.? But the club said it is about stoking debate on the issue of illegal immigrants. ?It’s not a racist event, first and foremost,? said Sarah Chambers, the 21-year-old president of the College Republicans. ?Just because we don’t want illegal immigrants being able to completely disregard the laws of our country doesn’t make us racist.??This is exactly the kind of discussion that should be happening on college campi, all over the country. Brave kids these Republicans at NYU, being called racists. That’s a typically left-wing trick to shut down debate, political correctness and all that. All right, where’s this from? This is from Duke University. ?When a man fails to help out around the house, his poor performance might be related to a subconscious tendency to resist doing anything his wife wants, a new study suggests. Men and women are sure to argue about this one. In fact, the man and woman who led the study disagree on the meaning of the results.? (Laughing) I can’t laugh too hard or a coughing spasm will erupt. ?Psychologists have long known about ?reactance,? the tendency to do the exact opposite of what’s requested by a loved one or boss. The new study aimed to find out whether the phenomenon might occur at a subconscious level. Participants were asked to name a significant person they perceived as controlling their lives, and another who just wanted them to have fun. Then they were asked to discern words from jumbled letters on a computer screen while the names of the people they had mentioned were flashed subliminally. The names were flashed too quickly to be registered consciously. Subjects performed better when exposed to the name of the person who wanted them to have fun than when exposed to the controlling individual’s name,? even though they couldn’t see the controlling individual’s name on the screen. ?Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University, ?Our participants were not even aware that they had been exposed to someone else’s name, yet that nonconscious exposure was enough to cause them to act in defiance of what their significant other would want them to do,? Further testing found that study participants who were more reactant responded more strongly to the subliminal cues and had a wider performance gap.? So the study has concluded that men are hard-wired to ignore their wives. It doesn’t also say that wives are hard-wired to ignore their husbands. No, I mean it doesn’t say that here. It?s totally focusing on men. And authority figures? Your boss, your spouse? Men hard-wired to ignore their wives. You know, I don’t know if it’s hard-wired or not, the study indicates it might be, this subconscious stuff, this subliminal stuff. But to me this is about nagging. I think men are hard-wired to ignore nagging in general. What men respond to is sex. Let’s be honest. I’m kidding. I’m just trying to stereotypical here. Anyway, men hard-wired, this is from Duke University, and we all know they know what they’re doing there, men hard-wired to ignore their wives. Slate.com, lib publication, ?Women Are Chokers — Studies show they cave under pressure. Why?? Article by Steve Landsburg. ?Among the highest paid corporate executives, only 2.5 percent are women. Among the most elite scientists (those who have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences), fully 9 percent are women. Depending on your biases, you can read that as evidence that women are better at science than business, that corporations discriminate against women, or (if you believe that profit-maximizing corporations get everything just right) that the National Academy discriminates against men.? You can read this any which way you want. ?If you have access to the World Wide Web, you’ll have no problem finding theories, evidence, counterevidence, and polemics galore on this subject. Here I just want to talk about one bit of evidence regarding one of the many factors that might be in play: Women — especially high-achieving women — choke under pressure. You can observe a lot of high achievers under pressure at a Grand Slam tennis tournament. Better yet, you can observe them under variable pressure –? I hate to have to stop there, ladies and gentlemen, but the constraints of the programming format cause this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPTRUSH: This is a left-of-center Internet publication story by Steven Landsburg called, “Women Are Chokers — Studies Show They Cave Under Pressure.” He says, ?You can observe a lot of high achievers under pressure at a Grand Slam tennis tournament. Better yet, you can observe them under variable pressure: Things are a lot tenser when the score is 5-5 than when it’s 0-0. Professor Daniele Paserman of Hebrew University made good use of this variability at the 2006 French Open, U.S. Open, and Wimbledon tournaments. First, he assigned an ?importance? to each point in each match. He did this by assigning probabilities to every way the match might unfold, accounting for players’ ratings, the surface they were playing on, and the identity of the server. That allowed him to say things like, ?If Roger Federer wins this point, he has a 60 percent chance to win the match; if he loses the point, he has a 55 percent chance.? The 5 percent difference measures the point’s importance. It turns out that by at least one measure?the number of unforced errors?men play equally well throughout the match. They make unforced errors on about 30 percent of the most important points, about 30 percent of the least important, and about 30 percent of all those in between. But women show a very different pattern: 34 percent unforced errors on the least important points, steadily rising to almost 40 percent on the most important. That’s almost surely too big a difference to be mere coincidence,? or statistical. ?What, besides choking, could explain those numbers? Maybe the closest games are usually played late in the match, when players are more fatigued; maybe more of those games involve weak players; maybe more of them occur at the French Open, where the court is harder to play. But professor Paserman tests all these theories, and none stands up to statistical analysis. Another countertheory: Maybe women play more defensively when the score is tight. If both players just keep lobbing the ball back and forth, there can’t be any forced errors, so all errors are recorded as unforced. In support of this theory, professor Paserman observes that women do play more defensively when the score is tight. (He measures defensive play by speed of serve, length of rallies, and so forth.) But, unfortunately for the countertheory, so do men. When the pressure’s on, both men and women get more defensive (and by about the same amount)?but only women make more errors. Meanwhile, another band of researchers (Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle, and Aldo Rustichini, of the University of California at San Diego, Stanford, and the University of Minnesota) has been running experiments to see how men and women perform in competitive environments.?What this leads to, ladies and gentlemen, is this. The final line of the piece: “But in competition against men, women do no better than when they’re working in isolation.? Competition against anyone, according to the statistical analysis here of this French professor, Pacerman, competition against anyone improves men’s performance. Competition against women improves women’s performance. But in competition against men, women crumble. In the corporate world, the grand slam Tennessee circuit, which takes us — you know, I don’t doubt this. It’s why there exists the Queen Bee Syndrome. The reaction? This guy is a Nazi! The readers of Slate.com cannot believe Slate published this. They cannot believe this guy wrote this, they are dumbfounded, they’re beside themselves. They are agog, they are aghast. Well, women and men, too. Female liberal, male liberal, what’s the difference? Including anatomically. Here’s One. ?Dear Slate editors. As a long time reader of your site and scientist, I am very disappointed in your decision to publish the article “Women Are Chokers. Studies show they cave under pressure. Why?” by Steven E. Landsburg. I am furthermore amazed that Steven E. Landsburg, who got his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago , an economics school famous for its mathematical rigor, would be taken in by such amateurish scholarship.? But some are not as civilized as that response. Some of them are responding like the guy’s a conservative on a conservative blog and they’re writing at the Daily Kos or Democratic Underground or what have you. Moving on, ladies and gentlemen, here with our Lifestyle Stack, isn’t this fun? How many of you have been raised to believe that sports builds character, that there are life lessons in sports? I was one who was raised that way. I happen to believe it to be true. But conventional wisdom, according to a new survey, is wrong. It suggests that US high skrool athletes cheat more than classmates who don’t play sports. ?The two-year study of high school athletes — conducted by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles — also found growing acceptance of cheating as a way to gain competitive advantage, the Los Angeles Times reported.? Do you know that cheating is new in our society, folks? It never used to happen until the Josephson Institute of Ethics began studying it.

?Michael Josephson, president and founder of the institute, told the newspaper the report — based on interviews with 5,275 high school athletes across the United States — found that many coaches are ?teaching our kids to cheat and cut corners. There is reason to worry that the sports fields of America are becoming the training grounds for the next generation of corporate and political villains and thieves,? said Josephson,? of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. What a na?ve boob. I’d like to know his definition of cheating. At any rate, this is just preposterous. The headline here, ?Sports May Not Build Character.? That’s crazy. But in addition to that being crazy, sports has given us a few characters. Many of them on display at All Star weekend in Las Vegas for the NBA. But you know what this is? This is an attempt to tear down the institution of sports competition as a way of learning life lessons, never quitting, get accustomed to things not going your way, that there’s more in you than you think you have. All of these great life lessons are now coming under assault because the victors, the winners are being categorized and characterized as cheaters. And they will end up being the next corporate and political villains. Moving along in our valuable Lifestyle Stack today, “Why Praise Can Be Bad for Kids.” Uh, after a decade, maybe even more, of all that self-esteem crap in the schools, we have produced kids who have not learned to try, according to this story. In fact, H.R., I want you to find something. We got a substitute broadcast engineer today. Ed, you may have trouble finding this. We have a PSA, we did this long ago of a teacher talking to a student who doesn’t know anything but whatever answer he gives the teacher says, ?Right, little Johnny.? See if you can find that, because it dovetails perfectly with this story, because we’ve had a decade of the self-esteem garbage. You must never say anything negative to your children, you must always praise them, if two plus two equals five and they think it’s five then that’s what it is until they learn it’s four, because we will not humiliate them. Now all of a sudden specific praise can be good, but too much praise can bring down kids’ performance. ??Wow, you got an A without even studying.? ?Your drawing is wonderful ? you’re my little Picasso.? ?Keep it up and you’ll be the next Peyton Manning.? If you’re like most parents, you offer praise to your children believing it is the key to their success ? those flattering words can boost a child’s self-esteem and performance. But according to a new study, praise may do more harm than good. For the study, researchers divided 128 fifth-graders into groups and gave them a simple IQ test. One group was told it did really well and must be very smart. The other group was told it did really well and must have worked hard. One group was praised for intelligence, the other for effort. Asked if they wanted to take a slightly harder test, the kids praised for their intelligence were reluctant. Of those praised for their effort, however, 90 percent were eager for a more challenging task. And on a final test the effort group performed significantly better than the group praised for its intelligence. Many of the kids who had been labeled ?smart? performed worst of all. The ?hard workers? got the message that they could improve their scores by trying harder, but the ?smart? kids believed they should do well without any effort.? What is new about this? What in the world is new about this? This is nothing more than good old-fashioned motivation. But we’ve been told for the last ten years, can’t criticize, must build their self-esteem. This is how we immortalize that in a typical EIB Network parody.

(Playing of parody.) This has been going on for years. That parody dates back to the early nineties. Now we’re getting close to the mid-2010s here. At any rate, now you can praise your kid the wrong way, and you can give too much praise. Here’s a classic line here. Carol Dweck, a professor of developmental psychology at Stanford University, ?Her surprising research, which she has repeated with hundreds of kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds, was published recently in the journal Child Development. ? Instructions for parents are to be specific about praise. Don’t be afraid to withhold it. The key is to be specific. Parents should praise children for their effort, their concentration, their strategies.? Now, you can praise them for their achievement but don’t praise them for being smart. Don’t tell them they’re smart because if they’re stupid, they’re going to get lazy. But, see, this is a problem. You start praising people for their effort and they’re going to start working harder than other people are, and they’re going to create a disparity, and the harder workers are going to make the lazy sloths look bad, and the cycle is going to repeat, the hard workers will be penalized.